USB stick gets corrupted
Hi Prusa Community,
my MK4s was working flawlessly until recently, where the (original Prusa) USB stick started to get corrupted and neither the printer, nor the PC could read it.
After reformating the stick on the PC, it worked fine again until I ran into the same issue again 2 weeks later.
Is this a known problem?
Does it help to buy a new (better quality?) USB stick or is this a firmware-bug corrupting the stick?
Best Answer by Walter Layher:
Do you use the feature for power loss recovery on your printer? In that case the printer will save the state of the printing progress after every completed line/command in the (b)gcode file. If you check the number of lines in such a file you'll get a very high number. That is a lot of write operations. USB sticks were not initially intended for this kind of use. That is also why they are not recommended for use as a system drive on a computer. They will wear out and fail eventually. SD cards generally can tolerate more write cycles, so the suggestion by @hyiger to use SD cards instead is appropriate.
RE:
Hi Prusa Community,
my MK4s was working flawlessly until recently, where the (original Prusa) USB stick started to get corrupted and neither the printer, nor the PC could read it.
After reformating the stick on the PC, it worked fine again until I ran into the same issue again 2 weeks later.
Is this a known problem?
Does it help to buy a new (better quality?) USB stick or is this a firmware-bug corrupting the stick?
This is known problem. Same thing happened to mine. Eventually they "wear" out. This is what I use with my printer, it works well and is perfect for devices like the printer: SanDisk 16GB Industrial MLC MicroSD
RE: USB stick gets corrupted
And I use this as well: Micro SD Card to USB Adapter
RE: USB stick gets corrupted
Eventually they "wear" out.
This is astonishing.
Neither did I plug the stick all the time - I was using wifi, so maybe plugged it 10 times in total.
Nor did I write excessive amount of data - I think I barely scratched 500mb on the stick. As I never deleted something, I also did not write to the same memory cells over and over again.
So do they just age, no matter how hard they used? Or is the printer using too high voltages and frying the stick?
Would the issue being resolved with an SSD-Card or would I run into the same thing in 2 years?
As I never had any issues with USB sticks on my PC, I just try to understand what exactly is going on here 🙂
RE: USB stick gets corrupted
Do you use the feature for power loss recovery on your printer? In that case the printer will save the state of the printing progress after every completed line/command in the (b)gcode file. If you check the number of lines in such a file you'll get a very high number. That is a lot of write operations. USB sticks were not initially intended for this kind of use. That is also why they are not recommended for use as a system drive on a computer. They will wear out and fail eventually. SD cards generally can tolerate more write cycles, so the suggestion by @hyiger to use SD cards instead is appropriate.
RE: USB stick gets corrupted
Hi All,
Yes, I feel your pain as mine did this more times than I would care to count!
I am thinking there may have been a bad batch of these out there as I gave up on the Prusa USB drive altogether and have been using a Sandisk Cruzer 16MB USB drive now for about three months and has worked flawlessly, so my suggestion is scrap the Prusa drive and replace with reputable and high speed brand.
RE: USB stick gets corrupted
Awesome explanation, that totally makes sense to me now 🙂
I will order an SD Card and adapter, as proposed by hyiger.
Thank you for both of your answers 🙂